PUNK HARDCORE - From the Beginning...

The Electric Circus began as a popular New York nightclub. It was the hippiest place in New York for the affluent celebrities, artists and social climbers to be seen. The downstairs section was turned into a bar called the Dom. According to Ronald Sukenik in Down and In: A History of the Underground, the entire Lower East Side, 'all the painters, all the poets, everybody in the world showed up'. There was no attraction except nickel beer. The glorified basement began hosting live jazz and bands that played back in the larger room for dancing. Upstairs the Electric Circus was still going, but had changed from being a Jackie Onassis celebrity place to being a kids' place. In late 1964, when the Beatles had just hit America, the Fugs were conceived in the dark recess of the Dom. Originally attracted by the poetry readings, Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg were two like-minded vermin who together spawned the unofficial origins of 'underground' music. They invented outrageous dances like 'The Turkey Gobble' to go along with their songs, released on the debut album in 1965 on the small jazz-oriented ESP label. Later released under the title Virgin Fugs, the album epitomized the Fugs' sense of humor and satire. The band inspired many lesser-known contemporaries such as Dave Peel & the Lower East Side, who produced such infamous songs on the album, The Pope Smokes Dope, like 'The Chicago Conspiracy', 'The Birth Control Blues', and 'I'm Gonna Start Another Riot'.

The Velvet Underground also played at the Dom, where they came to the attention of Andy Warhol, who was looking for a suitable rock group to add to his multimedia freakshow unit, The Factory. Instead of sharing The Fugs' sense of humor, the Velvet Underground relied on their detailed studies of urban realism, with the powerful interpretation of addiction in 'Heroin' and 'I'm Waiting For The Man'. After firing Warhol, they recorded the relentlessly abrasive White Light/White Heat in 1968, featuring the epic 'Sister Ray' an unprecedented orgy of squalling noise. While they eventually became much more influential than The Fugs, their jubilant yet brutal sound and imagery prevented them from selling any more albums on Verve than The Fugs sold on ESP. That same year (1966), Iggy Pop decided to form a band that would be completely unlike anything anyone had ever heard. After abandoning his stint as a drummer for Sam Lay, of the original Paul Butterfield Blues Band, he formed the Stooges in Detroit, (Michigan) with friends who could barely play their instruments. They had very little in the way of programmed musical knowledge to interfere with the ideas they'd be called upon to execute. Their 1968 performances consisted of an aural background for Iggy's body contortions, self-mutilation, diving into the audience and screamed insults at those who had come only to be entertained, not to become involved in the show. As a Neanderthal version of the Velvet Underground, the band managed to achieve the distinction of the first true influence on punk. Ironically, they were signed by the major label Elektra, and their 1969 debut was produced by John Cale. It was highlighted by the classic 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' and the pre-punk 'No Fun'. In '1969' they revealed the source of their outrageousness to be boredom, chanting 'another year with nothing to do.'

Also from Detroit, MC5 articulated their boredom in a slightly more politicized and distinctly blue collar manner, coming to prominence in the 1968 Democratic Convention riots as figureheads of John Sinclair's White Panther Party. While their heavy sounding music was not particularly original their attitude inspired many future punk bands, prophesying the Sex Pistols' conflicts with EMI and Virgin. They were soon embroiled in controversy over the lyric line 'Kick out the jams motherfuckers!' When at least one record store refused to stock the album, the group responded by taking out a viciously declamatory ad in a local underground paper. Elektra was not amused, especially when MC5 went further and plastered 'Fuck You' stickers bearing the Elektra logo over the record store's windows. Band and label parted company shortly after. The collective Detroit music scene became the most frequently cited influence of punk bands starting in 1975, and continuing through the next 15 years to many current post-punk bands.

Back on the East Coast, an 18 year-old kid named Jonathan Richman was excited after hearing the Velvet Underground's 1970 farewell album, Loaded. He use to perform unaccompanied in a park in Boston until he formed the Modern Lovers because, said Richman in an immortal quote, 'I was lonely'. He also wanted to follow up his own revelation of V.U.'s lyrical terrain and manic drone, with the help of future Talking Heads keyboardist Jerry Harrison and future Cars drummer David Robinson. Again, former Velvet Underground maestro John Cale guided another young legend by producing the first and last Modern Lovers album in 1971. Richman abandoned the aggressive worship of sex, drugs and other decadent vices in favor of a fresh romanticism of the modern world. By the time punk was underway in 1977, Richman's teary-eyed optimism and fantasy came forth in the form of silly children's songs at a time punctuated by bitter nihilism. Nevertheless, the Modern Lovers served their role as a stepping stone toward the first punk era by further defining the possibilities of exciting minimalist electric rock and roll.

The next step took the form of the New York Dolls. They made an appropriate debut when drummer Billy Murcia died of a heroin overdose soon after the self-titled album, produced by Todd Rundgren, was released in 1973. With the fuzzed-out guitar of Johnny Thunders and David Johanson's vodka-soaked growl, they pounded out apocalyptic songs of rebellious youthfulness beaten into a realization of a bleak future. When the Dolls' success began declining after their 1974 'Too Much Too Soon', their new manager Malcolm McLaren schemed a third album and a renaissance for them. McLaren had a revelation of how brilliant a band could be in it's badness, which prompted him to try gimmicks like draping them in the communist flag and, in their last stages of failure, a painted banner over them asking rhetorically, 'What are the politics of boredom?' The rest of the 'story' so to speak, has been told over and over, and worn into the ground. McLaren found the politics in the form of British working-class boredom, A youth culture being smothered by conservatism. Nihilistic shock-tactics like, a genuine hatred of their fellow bands, their record companies, and even their fans, made the Sex Pistols the most talked-about band of the decade. But they are often given more credit than is deserved. Americans more than made up for it's lack of a Sex Pistols, with the sheer volume and variety of exciting pre-Sex Pistols bands, from Big Star to Residents, Patti Smith Group , Neon Boys, Television, Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, Pere Ubu, Ramones, Dils, Chrome and MX-80.

In Britain, Damned was the first band to have the privilege of releasing the first punk album. After growing tired of writing about mainstream icons like The Band and Bruce Springsteen, Marcus seemed determined to thread a needle between all of the rebellious artsy/intellectual movements throughout time and space, ultimately sucking in punk through the small, ambiguous straw of Malcolm McLaren's background as a former art student and situationalist in Paris. It all rests on McLaren, a greedy, exploitative, annoying man who said he created the Sex Pistols so he could sell more trousers and a short time later said, 'we wanted to create a situation where kids would be less interested in buying records than in speaking for themselves'. Ironically, McLaren pinpointed the most important aspect of the invention of 'punk' the aspect he cared about least. Punk may have cosmic and sometimes conscious artistic ties to past radical movements, but most of its significance lies within the barriers of language and expression that were broken down. It was a breakthrough in free speech for underclass youth who rarely have a voice, neither culturally nor politically. The fact that the Situationalists had said many of the same things that Johnny Rotten/Lyden and his cronies did is irrelevant considering the difference between the exclusive elitism of the privileged college educated upper-classes and the inclusive unpretentiousness of a largely working-class youth.

Punk gives the message that no one has to be a genius to do it him/herself. Punk invented a whole new spectrum of do-it-yourself (DIY) projects for a generation. Instead of waiting for the next big thing in music to be excited about, anyone with this new sense of autonomy can make it happen themselves by forming a band. Instead of depending on commercial media, from the big papers and television to New Musical Express and Rolling Stone, to tell them what to think, anyone can create a fanzine, paper, journal or comic book. With enough effort and cooperation they can even publish and distribute it. Kids were eventually able to start their own record labels too. Such personal empowerment leads to other possibilities in self-employment and activism. It's 2001 and many people say punk is dead. Others say punk is still dying. Still others say the story of rock and roll is nearly over. Such people have at least learned one thing from punk: they have adopted the same blind pessimism that caused so many bands to burn out so quickly. Simon Frith and Mary Harron went on to generalize that punk's 'second generation' suddenly switched from 'anarchy and mayhem to orthodox left-wing politics' adopting the same ideas of grassroots networks and alternative distribution systems that the hippies had during the sixties counterculture, adding only rock hype - rebellion and conscious exploitation of the media.

They said it was only briefly that punk was able to 'exploit hype while challenging it on its own ground, both through its consistent attack on the values of the music industry and by exposing to its audience how that industry worked'. Then their 'Puritanism' was so bad for the music that 'post-punk austerity' began to pall. By declaring the death of a whole subculture just because the founding icons disappeared, the media and its scholars assumed not only that punk left behind a void, but it grew out of a void. Within this so-called void, there was a thriving skinhead subculture, originated either in the late 50's or the 60's depending on who's telling the story. While there is no convincingly authoritative source on skinhead history, there has been enough discussion about it in fanzines from Sniffin' Glue to Maximum RocknRoll that the disparities in details of the accounts tend to even out. In the December, 1989 issue of Maximum RocknRoll, John M. Stafford of Washington, D.C. wrote a letter that briefly summarized such accounts of skinhead history. He said skinheads resulted in a fusion of cultures between the white working class of England, immigrant Jamaicans and West Indian Blacks who called themselves rude boys. The ration of whites to non-whites during certain periods are unclear, although the resulting subculture was an undeniable example of cultural pluralism. The rude boys were into ska, a precursor of reggae that fused American R&B with Caribbean rhythms.

The mods and other whites were into R&B and Motown. When the cultures fused, popular skinhead music developed a mixture of R&B, soul and Jamaican music. Throughout the mid 1960s the Jamaican music became more important to the skinhead scene as the music came into much greater circulation. Skinheads were often noted for antisocial behavior such as going hippie bashing and for creating havoc in the soccer terraces. Their feud with hippies was rooted in the fact that the 'dirty long-hairs' with bellbottoms and sandals tended to be dropouts from white middle-class society, while skinheads took pride in their working-class, integrated origins and a more dignified style. Unfortunately, they had not yet adopted the hippie-rooted ideals of non-violence. Reggae was soon replaced by a new form of rock 'n' roll when a band of white skinheads called Slade started becoming popular in 1973 and introduced the skinhead world to Oi! or pub rock as it was known then. After two hit singles, Slade signed with a major record company and sold out to glam metal. But by then, of course, punk had arrived. While the popular Sex Pistols, the Clash and The Damned attracted a huge following, including many white middle-class teenagers, the skinheads chose to largely distinguish themselves from the spectacle, continuing to embrace Oi! bands like Sham 69, Cocksparrer, Oi Polloi and the 4 Skins. While Oi! music was often difficult to distinguish from ordinary punk by unfamiliar ears, the music reflected a musical style based on the old tradition of pub sing-a-longs, but often much, much faster. The words challenged the bloated corporate complacency of rock just as punk did.